Re: ONS and 50 year rule


"Roy Stockdill" <roy.stockdill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:mailman.4183.1173100456.30800.genbrit@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
If you want a certificate less than 50 years old and order on the
telephone, I don't think they have the right to refuse it.
Certainly, I've
advised people to be insistent and it seems to work. Perhaps you get
the
odd official who chooses to be bolshy, but I've never found it a
problem.

I am afraid - mea culpa, mea maxima culpa - that any little hitler in
office 'who chooses to be bolshy' with me is waving a red rag at a
very large fighting bull. to mix metaphors. I'll have his guts for
garters before the day is done. I'll ask nicely once. Then I'll quote
their own rules and explain what will happen if they do not follow
them. Then if they get bolshy what I said will happen does happen.

Oddly, I learned the trick from an old T&GWU senior shop steward in
the Smithfield area. For sorting out a safety issue to do with workers
it was necessary to have a hard case who could go into the environment
and see from the inside what was wrong. That hard case had to be a
shop steward. Old Bill insisted that I learn union rules, the job
contract, and employment law. Word perfect. He conducted vivas until
he was satisfied that I was up to speed. I found them tougher than
what my professors did at college. Bill had previously trained up
another steward the same way. Then a confrontation with management was
engineered. The owner put in his two sons, elegant young gentlemen
from the right school, and the union fielded its three stewards. The
young gentlemen got bolshy, at the expense of the safety of the
workers, so the three stewards went to war. With a blizzard of
accurate quotations of law and contract. We wiped the floor with them.
I asked Bill to explain. 'They were oafs thinking they had power. All
three of us are honours graduates who learned and used the power of
the law. It was no contest. All abusers of power can be demolished by
knowing the law better than the powerful know it.' Old Bill was that
rarity paid for by the union to do a degree at Ruskin, and feeling
obliged to go back and serve the union lifelong rather than swan off
to a political career of advantage to himself. Hence finding an Oxford
First as a shop steward in Smithfield. A great man and teacher on how
to deal with abuse of power.

The bureaucrats of ONS are as bureaucrats everywhere. They get idle
and do what is convenient to themselves in the belief that no peasant
can or will challenge their (mis)interpretation of power to suit and
aggrandise themselves. Old Bill's remedy is to quote accurately to
them the law they say they are enforcing but don't actually know. Then
you are asking them to do exactly what they have claimed to you they
are there to do: enforce the law 'as is'. There is no defence to that
tactic. They either have to admit they were wrong in their previous
interpretation or accept the consequences of you proving them in the
wrong in public. The former incurs embarrassment they won't like, the
latter carries the potential of ending their careers. It is not a nice
choice, but any little hitler who makes the second choice shouldn't
have been a bureaucrat anyway. So terminating their career is a mercy
to the many others whose lives they might have wrecked if they
continued in post.

It will, of course, be another generation before bureaucrats come to
understand that the old-style misinforming serially of the public will
not work. Then the public did not have easy means of communicating
widely. Now we do. This is it. It is not possible to misinform the
whole public about the law. Somebody will know the relevant bit and
bring it to attention of the public. Game over.

Don


.

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